#Yeah if the saxons went after her with spears she may have had a harder time while wearing chainmail

[mass-convergence]

For the end of the year ask! 8, 14, 20 and 25?

8. Game of the year? - Valheim. Definitely Valheim. It's such a beautiful game with amazing crafting/building mechanics and you get to be a viking that runs around punching deer to death in the meadows. There's really not much to dislike about that game aside from the absolute grind.

14. Favorite book you read this year? - Bold of you to assume I have the attention span to read an entire book. But I have started reading Fire Logic by Laurie J Marks and it is delightfully gay with a lot of women with swords. And I have been assured that the gays do not die stupid and pointlessly tragic deaths.

20. What’s something you learned this year? - Learned a lot on account of still starting out with my job. Most importantly I learned how to use the software we use to make our forecasts. Outside of work ... I learned how to sew which I hope to use that skill more and make my own tunics and stuff for historical reenactments.

25. Did you create any characters (in games, art, or writing) this year? Describe one. - Aside from my small army of self-inserts. Someone I created was Ratha for one of my AC Valhalla fics exploring Soma as an aroace lesbian. While I'm still not 100% comfortable writing her - she's a blacksmith in Grantebridge who Soma took in after finding her half dead on a battlefield. They strike up a very close friendship and definitely will become platonic life partners at some point. And it's also a fix-it fic because I don't understand why the fuck Soma doesn't have like at least chainmail if not something more substantial and stab proof.

Like yeah it was expensive af but she's literally the lord of a city that's ostensibly a successful trading hub in the area (fuck it becomes Cambridge in the future). Like as much as I'm sure she doesn't want to become like one of those nobles that just shit on their subjects and she wants to be down in the rough with all her men and be a good ally to Eivor.

She would or should at least be wearing some kind of mail or scale or lamellar armor (Also like Eivor can get the fancy ass fantasy style armor so Soma can at least get something historically accurate for a battle that's not whatever the fuck that leather vest is). And I'd argue that a viking age sword wasn't really designed to pierce through chainmail yet* - probably would have seriously ruined her day and knocked her out of commission but she'd probably be alive.

I just have a lot of opinions on the direction they took with her and really all the women in this franchise okay?

*- Chainmail is definitely weaker to piercing damage. Rapiers, longswords, and daggers were specifically designed later on to have thin tips so as to get between the links of maille and break them apart. I've seen that some Viking age swords had rather fat tips which would be more difficult in piercing the links of mail from what I understand of the matter. Also like ... it's fanfic I can write whatever I want.

Please don't get me started on lamellar or scale armor - which, side note, I'd definitely like to try my hand at making one of these days.